Halliburton, Baker Hughes to sell more assets

OREANDA-NEWS. September 29, 2015. Halliburton and Baker Hughes are offering to sell more assets to clear anti-trust hurdles as part of their planned \\$34.6bn merger.

The world's second-biggest oilfield services provider Halliburton announced acquiring its smaller rival in November to save costs and gain an edge on industry leader Schlumberger, in the first major merger deal in the current market downturn.

The plunge in crude prices to six-and-a-half-year lows has made almost every producer, including Chevron, Total and EOG Resources sharply pull back on drilling plans, forcing service providers to offer deeper discounts to retain share of a shrinking market.

Halliburton and Baker Hughes also pushed back the timeline to close the merger to no later than 16 December, after extending the closing date for review by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to 15 December from the current date of 25 November.

The acquisition has received regulatory clearances in Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Turkey, they said.

The businesses on offer are Halliburton's expandable liner hangers business, which is part of its completion and production division, Baker Hughes' core completions business, which includes packers, flow control tools, subsurface safety systems, intelligent well systems, permanent monitoring, sand control tools and sand control screens.

Baker Hughes' sand control business in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM), including two pressure pumping vessels, its offshore cementing businesses in Australia, Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, Norway and the United Kingdom are also being offered.

These are in addition to the earlier announced divestitures of Halliburton's fixed cutter and roller cone drill bits, directional drilling and logging-while-drilling (LWD) businesses, which are still continuing.

The combined revenue of all the businesses being offered was about \\$5.2bn in 2013.